Vaccine Discourse in White Nationalist Online Communication: A Mixed-Methods Computational Approach

Anti-vaccine sentiment strong among white nationalists - with some predictable exceptions

Research has indicated a growing resistance to vaccines among U.S. conservatives and Republicans. Following past successes of the far-right in mainstreaming health misinformation, this study tracks almost two decades of vaccine discourse on the extremist, white nationalist (WN) online message-board Stormfront. This mixed-methods approach combines unsupervised machine learning of 8892 posts including the term “vaccin*“, published on Stormfront between 2001 and 2017. Four themes were identified: conspiracies, science, race and white innovation. The prominence of themes over time was relatively stable.

As with past health-related conspiracy theories, high levels of anti-vaccine sentiment in online far-right sociotechnical information systems could threaten public health, especially if it ‘spills-over’ to mainstream media. Many pro-vaccine arguments on the forum relied on racist, WN reasoning, thus preventing the authors from recommending the use of these unethical arguments in future public health communications.